This recent article by The Guardian explains how the face of advertising is changing due to consumers’ desire to be interacted with at a more personal level.

The article explains how this change in consumption has led to a development in the use of artificial intelligence within advertising, with advertisements adapting depending on the reaction of those in the near vicinity. Personalisation is key.

There is a stack of fascinating insights within the article, including:

"Times are changing - In the past, casting a wide net in the hope of converting some consumers to take action worked. The infamous purchase funnel modelof awareness, interest, desire and action was the bible for many marketers. But this model was created in 1898."

Market to a small percentage of consumers, in a personalised way, rather than a large percentage in an impersonal way.

"Instead of trying to reach 100%, target the 5%. Flip the funnel metaphor on its head."

Machines can now learn our taste in products and genres, meaning marketing agencies have less to do.

"We now have to do more with less. Less money, less people, less time."

The concept of a free Internet is one we’re all used to. We all know that we can set up our own web page, blog, twitter account etc. without much hassle. But is this concept in jeopardy?

The debate on Net Neutrality and whether corporations should be allowed to sell ‘fast track’ web access to paying users has been talked about since the dawn of the World Wide Web.

Discussions are heating up and it’s worth staying abreast of what’s being talked about. This article in The Guardian gives an excellent overview of a digital discussion, which could impact principles many consumers take for granted.

1.ISPs are discussing charging content providers to deliver a fast track service to their audience (Netflix for example will stream quicker than other services because of this)

2.4 million people in the US wrote to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to voice concerns over Net Neutrality

3.Obama got involved and made a speech suggesting that the FCC should create a new set of rules to protect Net Neutrality - you can read about his principles on the White House website

This could turn into a morality discussion as it crosses the lines between what’s right and what’s profitable for a corporation. Will the Internet go the same way as the high street with big-brand chains being able to afford a more prominent position? We’ll have to see what 2015 holds.

what3words.com has re-invented the syntax of maps and location finding. They've replaced co-ordinates and post-codes with three easy to remember words. The service uses a huge grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3 metres x 3 metres. Each square has been given an address, consisting of 3 words from the dictionary.

A recent review article by the Spectator described it like this:

"What this system provides is a mentally salient, super-accurate postcode system for the whole world, oceans included. It is useful in Britain, but in countries which have no established address system it will save lives."Source: The Spectator

All the major browser providers are working on features that will enable them to send alerts from websites through a PC or mobile operating system.

In 2015, most Web browsers will release the ability to push notifications to visitors. Sites that use the feature will be able to let visitors opt in to receive notifications. The site can then send them alerts even if that site isn't open in the browser at the time. The technology will be delivered on both PCs and mobile platforms, and will work in a similar way to the notifications delivered by mobile apps currently.

Michael van Ouwerkerk, a software engineer working on push notifications for Google’s Chrome team says:

“Once the user has opted in, Web apps will be able to provide timely information to the user without having to go through an installation process. For example, when you check your flight status on an airline’s mobile website, a single tap could subscribe you to updates on any delays."

The exact timing of releases isn't clear yet. Tim Varner, cofounder of Roost, a startup offering development tools for Web push notifications, says he expects major releases from Google and Mozilla to happen within a few months.

“In theory the app store could lose a little bit of its hold on the market,”

However, some caution is needed before jumping into the technology, as it's not yet fully standardised, so there's a danger of VHS/Betamax syndrome. Apple, Google and Mozilla are all currently exploring different approaches. The W3C web standards organisation has a group working on a standard, but it's not complete.

Here at Proctors we generate many amazing websites for our customers and, while we do use other technologies, one of our core offerings is Drupal. Currently, this is the very nice and very stable Drupal 7.

We, Like a lot in the community, havve been waiting on the release of Drupal 8 for a very long time, testing the Alphas as they've come out to make sure we have an understanding of the major changes Drupal are making, as well as enjoying the fun of "something new".

Drupal 8 has been in development for a very long time. In fact the project was started once there was a feature freeze on Drupal 7. Drupal 7 was launched to the world on 5th January 2011. While the usual core support continued, work then began on Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 Goes Beta

The first packaged releases, known as Alphas, started to be released around May 2013. Now, we've just had the release of our first Beta. Great news for us as we can really start to get into Drupal 8 with the knowledge that most parts of it are now thought to be in a stable state. But of course this led to the questions from our customers - what is the difference between Alpha and Beta? Is Beta ok for us to use? What comes next, a full release?

Well, here's a run down of what they mean...

Dev

Short for development, Drupal just like us here at Proctors, will label everything they are working on initially as "dev". It means it is unfinished code, partly made functionality and very much a work in progress and/or a starting point.

This is most definitely not a stage to consider for real world sites. Luckily, you'd probably have to be a developer to know how to get your hands on the code in this early stage anyway.

Alpha

Drupal 8 has been in Alpha for nearly a year and a half. Alpha releases are the first to come out and be available for general download, though they obviously come with warnings.

To reach Alpha, most of the reported errors must have been resolved and the application working in a reasonable fashion. Usually at this point, most testing has been carried out by the developers themselves and testing is still very much in progress. Bugs and issues will still exist at this point, which will need ironing out.

Again, this is really not a stage to consider for anything production orientated, though most developers who use Drupal will start looking at this point to start learning the changes. The caveat being that there are usually no upgrade paths available from one alpha to another while issues are ironed out, so you shouldn't be doing more than just having a look and learning/testing at this point.

Beta

Drupal in particular, has a very key requirements around the number of remaining critical issues and release blockers that must be met to reach the Beta stage. In short though, Beta releases are usually only available once all the critical bugs are solved that might lead to data loss and/or present a security issue. Also by this point, APIs (application programming interfaces - the parts of the system that help other bits talk to it and each other) are stable enough to be frozen for any further development. Upgrade paths usually start to take shape during the Betas.

This is now a great time for those that use Drupal, from a programming point of view, to start having a real look around and start upgrading their own modules and learning the new things available. It's always worth reading the release notes though as upgrade paths, certainly to start with, may be patchy or not work.

As per the above, we still haven't reached a point where Drupal would be recommended for use on live, production sites though. In fact that will only come at full release time.

RC, or Release Candidate

By this point, there will have been no more critical bug reports in the last few Beta releases and the code is considered to be nearly stable. Release Candidates are those that are being considered as candidates for official releases. No more usability changes will be made by this stage. Drupal often go through quite a few Release Candidates in order to ensure the code is fully ready for release.

Now is a good time to start considering using Drupal 8 instead of Drupal 7 for projects. Which ones it is suitable for will still be a bit limited at this point but more on that a bit further down.

Full Release

Full releases will be version numbered to help later on with updating your site. By this point Drupal 8 will be stable and good to go on production sites.

But this does leave one question? Should you switch straight away? In truth that will most likely come down to two things:

How much functionality your site will need and

How many contributed modules have been upgraded to Drupal 8, which are needed to provide the functionality you require.

Luckily this time round, the functionality available in Drupal 8 "out of the box" is significant, so the wait for contributed modules to upgrade will hopefully be shorter. For example, Drupal 8 will come with in-place WYSIWYG editing now that the CKEditor has been put into Drupal 8's core. Views, a very powerful module used on almost every site for pulling out lists of content, amongst other things, has now been put into Drupal 8's core as well. Plus lots and lots of other great features from "mobile ready out of the box" to full, true, multilingual capabilities. If you want to read more about what will be in Drupal 8, have a look here:

There are a lot of very intelligent developers already taking advantage of the 3D capabilities of modern browsers. We expect to see an increase in support for CSS3 3D transforms, a lightweight, mobile-friendly method of rendering 3D graphics.

The HTML5 canvas has been promising greatness for years. This year we can expect to see more mind-bending and impressive apps, games and presentations harnessing the (currently) experimental 3D context with WebGL.

Right now, 3D canvas development is in the realm of the super-geek, and we believe that we’ll see an arms-race as development companies try to build a tool or framework which take it to the mainstream.

Thought experiment: You have developed a groundbreaking computing device, a worthy hardware challenger to every laptop, tablet, phablet, and phone known. Through a totally unrealistic quirk of licensing fate, you have the option of slapping the Apple, Google, or Microsoft brand on it. Which one do you choose?